Modern Polymathism

Just Let Them Die: Neighborhoods without a purpose.

There's a town outside of Pittsburgh that used to be a bustling suburb, but after the steel industry collapsed the town went with it. The town's recent history has been one of poverty, but recently there are possibilities for renewal. Braddock's famous mayor, John Fetterman, has been an aggressive proponent for redeveloping the town and has been seen everywhere from the Colbert Report to the NYTimes. He's an amazing guy, and he's made for media. 

Passionate residents aside, I have to say that I don't understand why they're putting all their energy into this particular town. It seems to have many disadvantages compared to similar places throughout the region: it's far from Pittsburgh, away from highways, has little in the way of architecture, etc. 
Perhaps John fell in love with the town when he went there for AmeriCorps? Maybe the political environment allows one man to have a high level of creative control? I'm not sure, but I have to say it doesn't seem rational. The Stimulus Act seems to agree as well - denying money for the area.
From a macro-view, We should be developing under-utilized neighborhoods in Pittsburgh itself. This would actually reduce the urban sprawl that I'm sure Fetterman opposes as well. A great example would be the Uptown/Soho/Bluff district. This is the area between downtown and the thriving Oakland education/research/medical districts and a minute from the booming Southside entertainment / nightlife district. If we're going to invest in an area, why wouldn't we put our energy into an area that could easily bring about high-density urban living?
I think that we need to accept that some neighborhoods have lost all their competitive advantages. Braddock used to be great because it was located on the Mon river, but today that's a non-issue. We need bang for buck - whether we're spending stimulus money or our precious time. In the end, it might be better to just let these neighborhoods die.

Domain Value Fees: CyberSquatters Be Damned

As anyone involved with the internet / startups knows, one of the plagues of the internet is cybersquatting - holding a domain without using it for legitimate purpose. The obvious effect of this is that a lot of great names go underutilized and are basically internet spam. 

People have been begging for ICANN to do something, and there are even laws like the ACPA that aim to reduce this squatting. Of course though, such laws are written so that Verizon doesn't have to deal with Verzon.com. In addition, it's basically expanding the trademark law to domains - which really doesn't always favor society's interests. 

This is really an issue of a "tragedy of the commons" - where a public good (i.e. a grazing  field) can be used without restraint by anyone (i.e. sheep). In the end, this resource will be depleted and unusable. The internet is just a really big field. Only the internet's size prevents us from having a larger problem. 

In the real estate world, this problem is very common. In some up and coming neighborhoods, people want to speculate while spending as little as possible. What they do is buy a useless building and demolish it so they don't have to pay for maintenance, but more importantly as much property tax liability. In most cities, the building, not the land, is the majority of the tax, so by just owning a lot, the speculator can get the highest return.

To solve this problem, you can impose a land value tax, which taxes only the land - not the building. What this does is makes speculating to expensive, and hence the land must be used productively. Ideally, the most valuable land (say downtown) is used for the highest value projects (skyscrapers, stadiums, etc.) and land is subdivided to increase urban density - and hence profitability and production per area.

I'm calling for the same principle to be used for domain names. It would work like an auction with the highest bidder winning the domain name. Owners would place a maximum bid they're willing to pay, and anyone could bid against it at any time. 

You're probably thinking, "What if I own X domain name, and I can't afford the fee?" For this, I would also propose a pretty low cap at a rate the keeps most squatters away- so that owners wouldn't be taxed out of the market. If we believe this guy, at most $500/yr would be sufficient. This will certainly make a lot of casual squatters think twice about hoarding good names, but it will also open up a lot of great domain names that are sitting idle as well.

There would probably still be squatters like Verzon.com, that might pay up for the off chance they get Verizon to pay. However, the auction system could be adapted to allow offers to be placed and must be responded too within X time period. This would encourage having the right contact info for sure. 

In the least, this would be a massive improvement for the internet. I'd really like to hear everyone's opinion on this though, because it's been something I've been thinking about for a while.

Filtering Reality

We live in a world overflowing with information. The internet's largest problem is organization of data - as Google has certainly embraced. Take a step back to a world before the modern explosion of data, and you'll see publishers ruled the information world. They were the curators of thought and the best actually were pretty impartial. The NY Times became huge by impartial coverage with its motto of "All the news that's fit to print". What great market dynamics to select the most truthful news source. This was needed at the time because there was no possible way of coordinating thought. 

Widespread consolidation took place in media during the 20th Century. People in the 1960's had only a few channels of radio and TV, and newspapers like The Times were very trust as the sole sources of truth. Today though these people still remain and hold massive influence, however their days are certainly numbered in their current form. Information can no longer be best created and allocated in this way. We're entering a new period of media.

Unlike social media cheerleaders though, I don't think the NYT is going to be dead in 5 years, but certainly they will have to change their role. The issue is that their place as "the" source is being widely questioned and of course their business model is being eroded by free and high quality online media. 

Without these organizations though, people argue that we'll be unable to know the truth. They say blogs feed off of the mass media. This is certainly true in that many blogs comment on the news, however I wouldn't mistake their commenting on the news as just following their lead. There are more and more sources of news, and indeed any user of Twitter has gotten the news before the mainstream media. Mass media still has the greatest ability to influence our daily thoughts and hence what bloggers think to talk about, however that role is diminishing. 

With the democratization of news comes the need to filter the information for truth and relevance. Sites like Digg, Reddit and SlashDot certainly find interesting and very often more relevant news than the mainstream media, however they're still highly susceptible to group-think. Critics point this out, however look no further than Fox News to find extreme group-think "news", and the same is true on the left. CNN, etc. all have a progressive bias, and both groups assume the narrative of the establishment - just both sides of it. 

Aside from these mature sites, there are other new concepts at filtering the torrent of online information. People talked about the semantic web knowing being able give great results based on a truer meaning of our queries, but we've not been able to realize this as of yet - and probably won't for a long time. Instead, we're seeing social answers to the questions of organization: Wikipedia, Twitter Lists, Ardvark etc. are all great examples of how we can filter reality.

We can see that new forms of media are providing smoother allocation of events and ideas, however we're still at the mercy of group think. What keeps us from just seeking news that fits with our current view? This is a question that worries me the most. Online sources will doubtlessly provide more / more relevant info, but we still don't see many (any?) opposing view points on news sites like Politico or Huffington Post. 

Before, we were told to look towards trusted sources - almost an act of blind faith. Today, we don't have that luxury. A major skill (habit?) we need to cultivate is the ability to decompose sources into facts and opinion, search for truth, form the most likely view, and update as new info surfaces. I'm not sure exactly how to do this - it could be an innate problem of humanity. If we can though, it will change the public discourse. This will change the outcomes, and those will change the world.

Living in the Grey

In today's world, and probably throughout time, people are always trying to live in the world of black and white. Are you Republican or Democrat? Pro-Choice or Pro-life? Every position is one side of a dichotomy. I used to be the same way, but I've been trying to train myself to leave these simplistic generalizations and live in the world of the grey. 

There are seemingly very few absolutes in this world, so few that I question the concept of "facts" itself. Most people will claim this to be ridiculous, however other than pure math there are no examples of these types of absolutes. The best absolute I can think of takes the form of: 1+1 equals 2 (in a base 10 system in our universe), however this is comparatively a very rare thing and must be defined rigorously.

It's funny that "grey area" is a pejorative in today's parlance. I find these areas to be the most interesting ones, and in fact I find people that trying to look for black & white solutions to be intellectually immature (i.e. not wise). What else is the mark of unsophisticated thought but being uncomfortable with complexity and uncertainty?

The distinction must be made as well between thought and action. We must think in the grey, but in the end decisiveness is essence of action. It may be that disparate actions spread resources or it could be that humans in general view you as a risk because you're unpredictable due to the complexity of your position.

This is one reason sound bites are de rigueur in today's public discourse. No one wants to actually think about positions beyond us and them or right and wrong. This seems like a systematic failure of the market of ideas. It's a veritable bubble of improperly valued thought-forms (i.e. sound bytes) - at least if you believe the market of ideas if supposed to value thought by its correctness. Instead, it seems the market works on the virality of the memes themselves - which of course brings the discourse down to the lowest common denominator.

Is not the real problem then how to live in such as world - one valuing easy thought over rigorous thought - while still trying to use such rigorous thought to make more correct decisions? Such is the realm of informed pragmatism (pragmatic realism?) long term reflection and short term decisiveness.

Wikis Unite!

One of my chief frustrations with wikis are the barriers between them and the zealous wiki editors. Wikipedia's tests of article relevance are fair, but aren't encouraging the formation of the sum of human knowledge. There is of course a trade-off between quantity and quality. If Wikipedia allowed me to make my personal page few people have an interest in keeping it accurate and really I have an interest in making myself look good.

Of course Wikipedia isn't alone - there are thousands of active wikis. One problem is that there are a lot of duplicate articles that are all written from different points of view, for different audiences, and in various degrees of depth. If I'm on Wikipedia, I'd like to be able to access the other articles because these other wikis are harder to find. The best attempt I can find is Wikia, but they only can have a fraction of the wikis, and there still aren't easy connections between them. 

I've been thinking of how to solve this:

The easiest (and worst) way is to just copy the text from the article into the rest and allow everyone on the different wikis to edit the same text - of course this doesn't allow the article to address the proper audience, so that won't work. 

I thought of maybe having parts of different wiki articles common between different wikis where Wikipedia article may be dynamically loaded in an iFrame between sites, but that gets messy very quickly. 

There is a more elegant way that could largely solve the problem though. What I propose is the use the same mechanism used for language selection on the left sidebar. Why not just have all wiki articles linked a similar sidebar. This may be possible semantically using the URL or at least at first manually. Say I'm on the Wikipedia article for options, and I want to know more. I can just clickthrough to Investopedia's page for options which is like an intro page the massive topic of options. 

Another possible way would be to have an in-wiki way of pulling pieces of other wikis into article subtopic. For instance, the Wikipedia article mentions the butterfly spread strategy and actually has a brief article on it. However, Investopedia has a very in-depth article about how to actually do it. You can even see a version of this in under option strategy section above. I just think it'd be great to have an easy way of including these articles amongst sites. 

Overall, I love wikis and making knowledge more accessible, but I think something like this is needed to better serve the long tail of articles on other wikis - saving them from the pragmatic wiki zealots.

Wikipedia: Give me site cites

People today are also obsessed, rightly, with proper citation of thought. In the brave new world of the internet, we are all obliged to prove our sources - especially in a no-name blog such as this. Linking makes this easy, but we must ask exactly how accurate these supposed facts are. Further, we should probably question the idea of "facts" itself because it's too black and white to be useful - but that's for another post.

I get into a conversation about once a month about Wikipedia's accuracy compared to standard encyclopedias. I will then retort that a study showed Wikipedia to be bigger (~3.5M vs. ~250K articles) and about as good as Britannica. They'll often respond that this just can't be true because it can be changed by anyone and it changes all the time. 

On the surface both points are certainly valid, however we first need to look at the purpose of encyclopedias to see what the real effects of this are. This overarching purpose is of course to provide a cursory primer of a topic that can be used by the general public - which the Citing Wikipedia article agrees with. You don't read Britannica to learn how to farm - you do it to learn what farming is. For this broad case of uses, there is no equal to Wikipedia. 

Books like Wikinomics and The Wisdom of Crowds make a great case for community created / managed knowledge. That knowledge can be accumulated faster, cover a broader area, and update faster using such a system - impossible with any other system. What they often don't talk about is the very real problem of changing citation sources. You can't quote Wikipedia articles directly (as we're all guilty of) - you really need to define it in terms of which article you're referring to. This is why I'm sort of thinking that to encourage good citations, we should link to the past edits page of the page. 

Here's an http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Citation&oldid=357673084. 

There are a few issues though. Firstly, the URL above doesn't tell you much, unlike the very clean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation. Also, there may be issues with these pages getting hit more often because they're not really intended to be used this way. I'd like to see a URL like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation/2010/04/24 or similar that'd be an easy shorthand citation for website and papers -  unlike the current blah MLA one: 

"Citation." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 22 April 2010. Web. 24 April 2010. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation>  

Really, any non-Luddite knows that Wikipedia and such projects are hugely beneficial and here to stay after Brittanica is bankrupt and recycled. I'd just like to see features like this that make the site citeable.